The present invention relates generally to acknowledgement of uplink transmissions in a mobile communication system and, more particularly, to resource allocation for acknowledgment channels.
A Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) protocol is used for uplink transmission in Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. When a mobile terminal transmits data on the assigned uplink resources, the base station sends an acknowledgement signal to the mobile terminal to indicate whether the uplink transmission was successful. The acknowledgement signal comprises a single bit that is set to 0 for a positive acknowledgement (ACK) or to 1 for a negative acknowledgement (NACK). The acknowledgement signal is transmitted on a dedicated control channel called the Physical HARQ Indicator Channel (PHICH). Each mobile terminal is assigned to a respective PHICH.
In LTE, the PHICHs for multiple mobile terminals are divided into PHICH groups. In FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) mode, the number of PHICH groups is constant in all subframes and is determined by system bandwidth and a higher layer configuration parameter. In TDD (Time Division Duplex) mode, the number of PHICH groups may vary between subframes. Each PHICH group can have up to eight channels, which all share the same resource elements. The PHICHs within a group are assigned different orthogonal spreading sequences to separate the channels within a PHICH group using code division multiplexing (CDM). A PHICH resource is identified by an index pair (ngroup, mseq), where ngroup is the PHICH group number and mseq is the index of the orthogonal sequence within the group.
For proper operation of the HARQ protocol, the error rate of the PHICH should be sufficiently low. Typically, the target error rate should be in the order of 10−2 for ACKs and 10−3 to 10−4 for NACKs. Because the mobile terminals do not all experience the same channel conditions, the assignment of PHICHs/mobile terminals to PHICH groups should be done in a manner to ensures that the transmit energy allocated to the PHICH for each mobile terminal is sufficient for the reliable detection of the acknowledgement signal by the mobile terminal.